related to constraints associated with gendered expectations for men to be providers. Employed wives reported more positive moods at work than did employed husbands. For many (but not all) women, an unhurried work pace and a friendly work environment contributed to their positive moods while on the job, demonstrating the importance of social support in the workplace for women’s mental health. Collectively, these findings suggest that the transfer of women’s and men’s routinized experiences in the workplace or at home to emotional distress is a gendered process. The translation of work and family experiences into emotional health or distress may depend, in part, on the degree to which the individual perceives the activity to be freely chosen and whether it provides opportunities for positive social interaction, rather than the characteristics of the activity per se.
In sum, the studies reviewed above suggest that scholars may achieve a better understanding of everyday hassles by considering the ecological contexts in which the hassles occur. A family’s construction of gendered expectations is one such context (Allen & Walker, 2000) and contributes to differences in women’s and men’s perceptions of and reactions to daily hassles. In addition, research has shown that a family’s socioeconomic status (Grzywacz, Almeida, Neupert, & Ettner, 2004; Maisel & Karney, 2012), exposure to chronic stressors at work or at home (Serido et al., 2004), nonstandard work schedules (Almeida, 2004), increased use of ICT, and minority stress linked to individuals’ race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or immigration status (Lincoln & Chae, 2010; Riggle, Rostosky, & Horne, 2010; Trail, Goff, Bradbury, & Karney, 2012) may exacerbate (or buffer) the impact of everyday hassles on family well-being. For example, aspects of the larger sociopolitical climate including anti-immigration policies and deportation enforcement initiatives enacted by the United States Department of Justice under the direction of the Trump administration have increased fear and stress, including risk for and fear of deportation and separation, among immigrant families in the United States. Increases in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, efforts to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico, the weakening of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the practice of the detention and separation of families at the U.S. border impact everyday hassles for Latinx immigrant families regardless of their legal status (e.g., Dreby, 2015). As spoken by a Mexican immigrant wife and mother who experienced immense anxiety about deportation, “Sometimes I dream that I go get [my daughter] at the school and there I find all the other mothers who tell me, ‘Don’t go back to the apartments.’ … Or sometimes I dream that my husband gets arrested by the police at work; they call me and tell me that he is in jail” (Dreby, 2015, p. 38). As this example illustrates, everyday hassles are embedded in a larger context that amplifies the impact that seemingly minor irritations (e.g., picking up a sick child from school, a traffic stop for a broken taillight) have on family and personal well-being. Laws and policies that institutionalize discrimination are an important dimension of context that scholars have begun to study and address via publicly disseminated policy statements documenting their harmful effect on families (e.g., American Psychological Association [APA], 2019; Bouza et al., 2018; Vesely, Bravo, & Guzzardo, 2019).
Adaptive Processes
According to the VSA, the processes that family members use to cope with everyday hassles have important implications for how those hassles affect family interactions. In general, two different patterns of responses have been identified following workdays characterized by heavy workloads or negative interactions with coworkers: (1) increases in marital or parent–child conflict and (2) social withdrawal. These patterns, however, vary across studies, within couples, and by reporter.
In one of the first daily diary studies of married couples with children, Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, and Wethington (1989) found that on days when husbands experienced an argument at work with a coworker or supervisor, they were more likely to return home from work and argue with their wives, but not with their children. For wives, however, the researchers found no significant associations between arguments at work and subsequent arguments with spouses or children. In contrast, another diary study conducted by Story and Repetti (2006) found that wives, but not husbands, reported more marital anger toward their spouse and were more withdrawn from family interaction following workdays characterized by heavy workloads and unpleasant social interactions. In an interesting twist, husbands’ reports of their wives’ behavior suggested that husbands did not notice their wives’ displays of anger or withdrawal on these same days. This may be partially explained by the finding that everyday hassles at work were found to contribute to wives’ negative moods, which in turn colored wives’ perceptions of their interactions at home. Although husbands did not perceive their wives to be more angry or withdrawn following difficult days at work, wives perceived that they were more irritable and less emotionally available, in part, due to their negative moods. For some families, daily stressors experienced at work may also spill over into interactions with children. For example, Repetti’s (1994) early work demonstrated that fathers engaged in more expressions of anger toward children and more harsh discipline following days characterized by negative social interactions at work. In addition, both mothers and fathers have been shown to be less behaviorally and emotionally engaged with their children following busy workdays (Repetti, 1994; Repetti & Wood, 1997a).
Daily relationship stress—or hassles related to the sharing of housework, different goals, and partners’ annoying habits—may also be important in understanding the link between everyday hassles (e.g., at work) and couple functioning (Falconier et al., 2014; Ledermann, Bodenmann, Rudaz, & Bradbury, 2010). For example, a study of 345 married and unmarried Swiss couples found that the everyday hassles that partners experienced impacted their overall relationship quality and communication effectiveness via elevations in daily relationship stressors (Ledermann et al., 2010). In a second Swiss study of 110 couples, Falconier et al. (2014) found that women’s daily hassles predicted their own physical well-being and anxiety and both partners’ relationship stress. Women’s relationship stress, in turn, was related to women’s depression and both partners’ relationship satisfaction. Men’s daily hassles were related to their own relationship stress, depression, anxiety, and physical well-being. Men’s relationship stress predicted their own depression and relationship satisfaction. Taken together, these findings suggest that although daily hassles are inherently beyond couples’ control, couples who adopt effective strategies to reduce relationship stress may be able to protect their relationship quality and satisfaction from the negative effects of everyday hassles.
How might family members buffer others from the effects of the everyday hassles they encounter? Repetti and Wood’s (e.g., 1997b) early research suggested that parents’ behavioral and emotional withdrawal may actually protect children from the transmission of their parents’ negative work experiences. Another early study (Bolger et al., 1989) found that when husbands experienced greater-than-usual demands at the workplace, they performed less household labor and childcare when they returned home, and their wives compensated for their withdrawal by performing more of the work at home. The parallel pattern did not occur when wives experienced overloads at work. When wives experienced overloads at work, they too performed less work at home (i.e., behavioral withdrawal), but their husbands did not reciprocate by performing more. Bolger et al. (1989) label this an “asymmetry in the buffering effect” (p. 182) and suggest that, in the short term, wives’ stepping in for husbands may alleviate husbands’ stress and avoid the transmission of stress from husbands’ daily hassles to children. However, this short-term adaptive process may prove harmful over time for families—most particularly for wives. Coping in this manner in repeated instances over time may be one factor in explaining the consistent finding that marriage benefits the emotional health of men more than that of women (Amato, Johnson, Booth, & Rogers, 2003). To the extent that women’s emotional health plays a key role in child well-being (Demo & Acock, 1996), a pattern of asymmetrical buffering may be detrimental for children in families as well.
Additionally, several researchers have inquired as to how patterns of emotional transmission from daily hassles in the workplace to home vary based on the quality of the marital relationship (Schulz et al., 2004; Story & Repetti, 2006). Story and Repetti (2006) found that both husbands and wives
